Wayback Machine tool for viewing missing/censored web content

We often take for granted websites, online articles, and resources. The truth is websites and articles are often changed. This can either be an update, website expires, content goes down, or even censorship.

As a way to fight against this and preserve a record of the internet Archieve.org has created The Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine allows you to input a URL and get back a list of snapshots of a webpage from the past. Not all webpages are backed up as it requires the page to have been scrapped by the tool's web crawler.

As an example we can look at the entry for "Cultural Marxism" on Wikipedia. This is an article which previously existed as a separate page at the URL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cultural_marxism. If we put the URL into the Wayback Machine we get the following:

We can click on any date where a snapshot was taken and look at what the page looked like on that day.

Using the Wayback tool we can see that the article first went live all the way back in the year 2006, it was free to read until 2014 when some moderators wanted it deleted for political reasons. Since then it has been redirected to a sub-section of the Frankfurt School article under the header "Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory".

What is funny about that to me is that while I was studying journalism at university, we had to read about Cultural Marxism as if it was a great thing. Our curriculum told us about how cultural marxism was the use of culture/arts to push forward political ideas (just and good ideas according to most of our text books).

The textbooks couldn't be updated as quickly as the Wikipedia pages which are constantly monitored and updated according to the agenda of the moderators of Wikipedia.

As a side note you really should check out Everipedia, a new Wikipedia alternative running on the EOS blockchain.

The deletion can be read more about on this old reddit thread, and the moderator logs on wikipedia.

While the way-back machine is a great tool for backing up content which could potentially be censored , we also have to recognize that it is centralized. Any centralized tool like this can be manipulated and modified at anytime.

That is why it is important to make backups of articles yourself. If you're computer savvy enough to use command line, and run a simple Ruby command you can easily make massive backups from the Wayback Machine yourself.

I found out how thanks to this answer on stackexchange. The author made a Ruby gem called wayback_machine_downloader you can install it with the command gem install wayback_machine_downloader.

Once installed backing up sites is a simple as running:

wayback_machine_downloader http://mywebsite.com

The program will then download every snapshot for that site.